


Buckle

by futureboy



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: 5+1 Things, Bad Pick-Up Lines, Bets & Wagers, M/M, Misunderstandings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 21:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15782136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futureboy/pseuds/futureboy
Summary: Five times Jeremy used a pick-up line on Ryan, and one time Ryan used one on Jeremy. Office fic.





	Buckle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [smittenbritain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/smittenbritain/gifts).



> [RPF disclaimer: Written according to guidelines set by RT employees (to the best of my knowledge). This is a fictional series of events using characters inspired by real people.]
> 
> For Cole, who is a complete sweetie and also the coolest. ♥

 

**1.**

 

Ryan’s pretty sure he wants to kill Geoff.

Don’t get him wrong - he _hates_ clichés, and he hates doing what everyone expects of him, because it’s boring. He feels this time, however, would be justified. He’s not filled with murderous rage, exactly... It’s more that he wants to humanely put Geoff down, in order to stem the embarrassment and humiliation at its source.

“Guys,” Geoff says, “what is--”

(Ryan has only just noticed how much Geoff’s random questions sound like Gavin’s random questions. Somehow, Geoff never gets made fun of for them, though.)

“--What is the worst pick-up line you all know?”

“Uh, I think you mean _best_ ,” says Lindsay quietly.

“‘Cos mine is,” Geoff says, pausing for effect, and really? He couldn’t have done this outside of filming a video? “Mine’s: ‘ _do you like soda? Because I’d Mount-and-Dew you_ ’.”

“Geoffrey, that’s horrible. You’ve got to be more forward. Less joke-y.”

“What’s yours, then, Gavin?” he retorts.

“Simple,” says Gavin. “You ask them, ‘ _do you have any Italian in you?_ ’, and then when they say ‘no’, you ask, ‘ _would you like some?_ ’--”

Michael interrupts. “You can go more forward than that. Like… ‘ _Nice fuckin’ weather…. Wanna?_ ’”

“Jesus Christ!” Jack splutters, as the rest of the room loses it. “I really hope that neither of you use those on your significant others.”

Ryan catches Lindsay waggling her eyebrows across the room. “Why, what would you use on Caiti?”

“Here’s the thing: I’ve already picked up Caiti. Pick-up lines are supposed to be _funny_. I’d probably use something like, ‘ _hey, do you like bacon...? Wanna strip?_ ’ And that would be fine.”

“I can get on board with that,” Lindsay agrees, over Geoff’s continuous howling. “What about puns? _‘I like you furry much. Dinner and a mew-vie?’_ Would that work on you, Michael?”

“Definitely not.”

“Aw.”

Gavin suddenly bounces in his seat. “What about you, Lil J? You should absolutely have something for this.”

“You _have_ been remarkably quiet, Jeremy,” Ryan throws in.

He glances over, knowing that whilst he’s distracted, Michael will probably be lacing his in-game surroundings with C4. Jeremy is squinting at his screen; a laugh is pulling at his lips, but it hasn’t quite escaped yet.

“Ah, well,” he says, a little awkwardly, “I was actually sifting through all the ones I know in my brain. If I just dump my genius on you and tell you guys all the best ones, there’s gonna be none left for when I actually need them.”

“And when are you gonna need them, Jeremy?”

“ _Ouch_ , Gavin. Uncalled for.”

“Eh, I think it was fair.”

Ryan’s heart gives a nasty, sickening lurch, as Jeremy makes firm eye contact with him. “What about you, Ryan?” he asks, and _fuck_ , if Ryan wasn’t already gone for him, then the mischievousness in his grin would have caught his interest somehow.

“I don’t,” he says, trying not to stammer, “I’m not a fan of using pick-up lines--”

There’s a chorus of groaning and condemnation from around the room. “See, Ryan, this is why you never get laid,” Geoff deadpans.

“It’s also why I’ve never had an STI, Geoff,” he fires back, and then Michael says something about burning and lets loose a whirlwind of in-game fire.

It’s only after they finish recording - Ryan having replaced all of his vehicles, Michael, you _fuck_ \- that he realises someone got away scot-free.

“You really threw me to the wolves, there, Jeremy,” he says, pretending to be hurt, when he creeps up on Jeremy’s desk afterwards.

“I did no such thing,” says Jeremy. He reconsiders remarkably quickly: “okay, I kinda did. Sorry, pal.”

Ryan huffs. “Sorry isn’t gonna cut it. I’m _dead_ now. Death by wolf. And I’m very upset about it.”

“Well,” Jeremy says, grinning, “if you’re feeling down, then I can feel you up?”

He _feels_ the heat rise up through his face, getting caught itchily over his scalp and making him smooth down the hairs on the back of his neck. “That’s one of your good ones?” he asks, trying to deflect, “I’m shocked, Jeremy, I thought you were better than that.”

Jeremy smirks. “Oh, Ryan. I can definitely do better for _you_.”

 

* * *

 

**2.**

 

“...Moonball.”

“Ow,” says Jeremy, rubbing his shoulder.

“Oh, sorry, Lil J,” says Gavin, aiming in the opposite direction, “I’ll go this way next time. Although who knows when that’ll b--MOONBALL.”

“Gavin! For fuck’s sake--”

Jack tries to fling it back in retaliation, but Geoff lunges at his at the last minute and gets a face full of plastic.

“Ow!!”

“Geoff, you idiot, you got in the wa--AAARGH!”

Jack emits an unholy shriek - Geoff’s just stuffed the Moonball down the back of his shirt.

“Hold still, asshole!”

“Geoff, get the fuck off me-- _God_ , you’ve got cold hands!”

From behind him, Geoff slinks his arms around Jack’s shoulders. “Have I?” he leers. “Can I warm them down your pants?”

Jack laughs, despite clearly wanting to keep a straight face, and tries to unpeel himself from the hug. “I don’t know where you’ve been,” he tries, “I could catch something.”

Ryan glances at them warily. “Stop saying things you thought with your _other_ head, Geoff, dear.”

Apparently, this is exactly the kind of setup that Jeremy’s after, because he jumps in without a moment’s hesitation. “Do all guys think with their dick, d’ya think, Ryan?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan says suspiciously, “probably. Sure feels like it.”

“In that case,” Jeremy says - he rubs at his shoulder unconsciously - “will you blow my mind?”

There’s a beat as the room processes this request.

Geoff wordlessly hands Ryan the Moonball.

“No, Ryan, _wait--_!”

 

* * *

 

**3.**

 

Much to Ryan’s chagrin, the fad begins to spread.

“Want a sixty-eight?” he overhears, from Blaine’s general direction on the podcast set. “You go down on me, and I'll owe you one later.”

And on Tuesday, when he’d been in the kitchen at lunch time, he catches Miles and Barbara chatting about the current state of affairs in the office.

“Hey, Ryan!” Barbara says. “Is it true that Achievement Hunter started a pick-up line challenge? I’ve got _so_ many.”

Miles snorts. “They’re definitely better than mine. For _definite_.”

“Why,” Ryan says, “what’s your best one?”

“I’m a writer,” shrugs Miles, “you’re a writer… Let’s get together and put some poetry in motion.”

Barbara fixes him with raised eyebrows. “Who did you use that one on? Kerry?”

“Ehh, he said no.”

“I’ve gotta… go. I need to talk to Trevor,” Ryan says flatly. He’s getting a little weirded out, and he thinks it might be from exposure to too many come-ons.

Except when he gets to the Support Room to find Trevor, he finds that it’s spread to their office, too.

“Are you my editing list?” Larry asks. “Because I'm not doing you but I _definitely_ should be.”

“Oh, for god’s sake.”

“Hey, Ryan!” Steffie says brightly. “Have you got one? We haven’t heard a line from you yet, and Tumblr keeps asking for a complete list.”

“No!” he says, “I don’t have a pick-up line for anyone! No-one’s getting picked up. At least… Not by me.”

“Aw, why not?” she says.

“Yeah,” says Larry, “we’ve got a hundred thousand of ‘em from Jeremy and negative that from _you_. Gotta tip the balance, man.”

Ryan mutters a string of incoherent words under his breath. He’s well aware - they’ve all been directed at him, and he got absolutely fucked over with a facecam video where he turned a startling shade of red.

“Can you just tell me where Trevor is?”

“Right here,” comes the reply from behind him. “What’s up?”

Ryan turns around. He’s intending to ask about this week’s Off Topic, but closes his mouth with an audible _click_ \- Trevor’s just come back from lunch, clearly, and he’d been eating with Jeremy.

“Hey, Trevor. Uh, you know what?” he says awkwardly, “I’ll just email you. It’s no problem. Hey, Jeremy.”

“Hi, Ryan.”

Ryan’s sweating. He needs to leave, like, right now, before he says something dumb and gay that he might regret. He’s actually got his fingers wrapped around the door handle, when over the chatter of the room, he hears:

“Oh, Ry? Are you turning up to film AHWU tomorrow?”

“Um… Yeah,” he says, frowning. What a weird question. “How come?”

“Oh, no reason,” says Jeremy flippantly, “I just saw you checking out this package earlier. That’s all.”

Ryan glows like an ember. His continued presence in the office is equally as fleeting.

 

* * *

 

**4.**

 

“Do you wanna try an Australian kiss? It's like a French kiss, but down under.”

“Let’s _stop_ ,” says Michael. He sounds tired - Geoff’s voice breaks, put under a considerable amount of strain by his entertained wheezing.

Ryan starts to export his audio. He’s hoping to get home early tonight - later, he’s gonna be streaming a co-op game with Meg.

_Mhm-mhm._

Huh. A text message.

 

**Jeremy Dooley: Do you like my belt buckle?**

 

Ryan glances up. Across the room, Jeremy is the picture of innocence, fiddling with the camera tripod and chattering away to Gavin.

 

**Ryan Haywood: I can’t see it from here.**

**Jeremy Dooley: I could give you a close up. It’d look better against your forehead.**

 

He hears stifled laughter when his eyes violently roll.

 

**Jeremy Dooley: (Yeah, make sure to let me know when I’m about to cross the workplace harassment line, buddy.)**

 

* * *

 

**5.**

 

“Hey, Ryan...”

Oh, god. Jeremy’s leaning over his desk. It’s first thing in the morning and Ryan can’t do this - it’s too early for his homosexual neuroticism to bubble its way to the surface. It’s just them who’ve clocked in so far, so they’re all alone in the Achievement Hunter office. He almost considers asking if Jeremy can come back in an hour or so.

“What’s up, Jeremy.”

Jeremy leans over the desk, planting a rough hand on the other side of Ryan’s keyboard and boxing him into his office chair. Ryan can smell his cologne. He’s actually getting a little dizzy.

“Know what I like in a man?” Jeremy asks, in this deep voice that Ryan’s never heard before.

“What?” he whispers.

Jeremy grins wickedly and bends down slightly, bringing their faces closer together. “My dick.”

“Oh!” Ryan bursts out, and stands up, “that, uh, that’s pretty funny, Jeremy, _hah_. Hahaha ha. Hey, I’m gonna go pass that onto Steffie right away, she was saying something last week about a list of these for, um, for Tumblr--”

He clips his own heel trying to walk backwards, stumbling slightly as he tries to reach the door. In fact, he almost collides with Michael, about to enter the office to begin his day.

“Easy there, Ryan,” Michael says, “you saw me yesterday. Down, boy.”

“That’s not-- uh, sorry,” babbles Ryan.

Michael’s eyes flicker between him and Jeremy. “Is this it?” he asks. “Damn. I’m telling Gavin, you owe him five bucks.”

Just like that, Ryan’s blood drains from his face in the other extreme. He looks over his shoulder at Jeremy - pouting and laughing awkwardly in the face of paying up - and suddenly understands. A bet. Of course. Jeremy’s been trying to get him flustered, just to prove he can.

Right.

Nothing less. And certainly nothing more.

 

* * *

 

**+1.**

 

“I’m stupid,” Ryan says into his thumbs.

“You’re not stupid. Come on, Ryan, what’s up?”

Ryan unsteeples his fingers and considers Geoff’s question. “You gotta promise not to laugh,” he says, carefully, “and not to tell anyone.”

“This better be good,” warns Geoff.

Ryan takes his elbows off the desk and lays his arms over it instead, smooshing the side of his face into the back of his wrists. “Ughhhh,” he says, “basically…. You know Jeremy’s pick-up lines? Which you started, by the way, I haven’t forgotten that - well, he was making bets on how embarrassed I could get, I guess, but I thought he was just directed them at me because...”

He stops.

“Ryan? Because what?”

He rolls his face sideways, so that it’s fully pressed into his arms.

“Because you thought something was there?” Geoff guesses.

Ryan’s loathe to admit it. God, he feels like a complete moron. Thinking he had a chance in the slightest had been a terribly optimistic and _incredibly_ boneheaded stance to take up.

“Man,” says Geoff thoughtfully, “maybe you _are_ stupid, if you really don’t know what’s going on. I can’t believe you don’t, but it would be an amazing Ryan move to pull… Huh.”

Ryan sits up. He can feel a big red line across his jaw, from where he’s been leaning against his right bicep. “What the hell are you talking about?” he asks.

And Geoff blinks: “damn,” he says, “you really _don’t_ know.”

“Don’t know _what_?!”

“Jeremy wasn’t betting with Gavin to embarrass you,” he explains slowly, “he was betting _against_ Gavin that you'd get embarrassed in the first place. Gavin said that you were totally into his stupid lines and Jeremy said ‘no way, Ryan doesn’t like me back like that, don’t be ridiculous, Gavin’, and then he had to pay Gavin twenty dollars for what Gavin called ‘matchmaking services’. Ryan? Where are you goin’?”

“Why can’t any of you people hold normal conversations?” Ryan asks, flustered, and promptly leaves the room. They’ve got a VR video scheduled for filming this morning - if Jeremy’s anywhere, he’ll be setting up in the VR room. So he immediately heads there.

The assumption proves correct when he finds his co-worker already there, waving controllers around and testing that the headset is calibrated properly. Ryan can see him biting his lip underneath the goggles.

“Is that you, Gav?” he asks, looking around blindly. “Can you tell me the FPS? This keeps crashing on me and I can’t figure out why.”

Instead of examining the computer, Ryan pads over to stand in front of Jeremy. Very, very gently, he takes hold of the VR headset - Jeremy freezes, allowing whatever is happening him to come to pass.

Ryan removes the headset with a smile.

“There are so many things you can do with a human mouth, though,” he says, focusing very intently on not flubbing the dialogue. “Why waste it on talking?”

“Ryan Haywood,” Jeremy says, delighted and completely puzzled, “are you hitting on me?”

“Yes,” he replies, removing the headset entirely. “God, yes. I wanna make that _extremely_ clear.”

“Oh my god. I thought I’d fucked it,” says Jeremy, “thought I’d totally fucked it. Wait, I haven’t fucked it, right?”

“There’s still time for you to,” Ryan says.

Jeremy goes a wonderful shade of pink and _giggles_ , putting the controllers into his back pockets and sliding his hands up to rest in the inside of Ryan’s elbows. Ryan’s heart suddenly becomes acutely aware of its own weightlessness.

“You’re right, you’re always right, talking’s a waste,” Jeremy gets out in a big rush, and tugs on Ryan’s arms enough to get him to kissing level. Ryan grabs at his shirt with one hand and tries not to drop the VR headset with the other, feeling that first drag of bottom lip against top and the pleasant drowning sensation that follows. He’s smiling. Trying not to, of course, but he can’t help it - it’s first thing in the morning, Jeremy tastes faintly like toothpaste, and he’s about a hundred and one percent sure that there are a few more bets he needs to know about.

Hell, he thinks he can probably demand a share in some of the winnings. Or pretend not to know about any of them, and tip the odds in his favour for a few months.

Jeremy runs his tongue over the sensitive inside of Ryan’s mouth.

For now, any bets - and alternative pick-up lines - can definitely wait.

**Author's Note:**

> My writing blog can be found [here](http://futureboy-ao3.tumblr.com/).
> 
> Kudoses, comments, and subscriptions are appreciated! ♥


End file.
